Tag Archives: decorated eggs

Ah, the smell of vinegar and boiled eggs first thing on Easter Sunday morning. The little colored tablets of food dye. That pesky wire dipper that was supposed to “hold” your egg while you drowned it in ultramarine blue. Pffft, that thing never worked – you always had to steady the egg with your other hand anyway. Thanks, Paas. Who else remembers a plastic tool some kits included? – it held a marker in place while you turned your egg and was supposed to make lines all the way ’round the surface. Invariably, the lines would end up jagged, appearing to indicate a crack in the shell. For those of us who are haunted by that annual failure, there’s the new and improved solution: the Egg-Bot. This contraption goes for $200, but you’ll never again be shamed by that know-it-all Susan Meriwether and her paisley egg designs at the neighborhood Easter egg hunt. If the Egg-Bot intimidates you, there are still plenty of old world solutions to expressing yourself with chicken embryos. These Ukrainian women are making Pysankas. Pysaty means “to write” and Ukrainian Easter eggs are decorated using a wax-resist method called batik. Batik is more commonly seen used in decorating fabrics. But many Easter European countries have long used it for writing on eggs with beeswax, rather than painting them. What’s the biggest pysanka ever made, you ask? Easy – it’s in Vegreville, Alberta. It’s three and a half stories high and was commissioned in 1975 as an acknowledgment to Canada’s Ukranian culture. If you’re looking for something a little smaller (and easier), you could always pass off some pop art designs with acrylic paint, rather than dyes or wax. Here’re some Roy Lichtenstein-inspired eggs – equally satisfactory to the comic book nerd in the family. We hadn’t seen this before, but evidently using silk neck ties to transfer the patterns onto eggs is an easy short cut to some fancy designs. If after all this, yer still not inspired to let your artist’s flag fly this week, well, there’s a little box you can buy that’ll practically do the work for you. And if they don’t come out gallery-worthy, you can always eat the results.